Intelligent document scanning with active camera

Document scanning is important as a prerequisite stage for analysis and recognition. Recently, a lot of researches about document image acquisition using a camera have been attempted, and the camera can be an alternative input device for document scanning if we can solve some problems such as the low resolution. We use an image registration to overcome the low resolution of a camera. An ordinary image registration method needs a pre-processing such as a camera calibration to reduce distortions on the composite. Therefore the ordinary method has an extra running time. In this paper, we propose a component-based image registration method to concentrate on reducing the distortions and acquiring a seamless image using a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera without pre-processing. Because we divide the input document image into each component and generate the registration on text components using a text-specific characteristic, this method leads to reduce the object (text) distortions on the composite, and we save the extra running time because this method does not perform the post processing.